Hello there,

This is my first post, although I've lurked for a while. I'm 2 months in to the final (3rd) year of my PhD and am meant to be starting to write up. My PhD is based on interviews and participant observation and I appear to have a massive amount of data that I'm finding difficult to consolidate, or even find what my focus is as I could write about ten different theses based on what I have collected (not boasting, just finding it difficult to know where to start!). The thing I'm struggling with is that I don't seem to be able to 'theorise' anything, just report what people have told me, and I'm not sure how to do it. Is it OK just to say, 'So-and-so says this, therefore X' or should I be looking to say, 'So-and-so says this, therefore Big Grand Theory of What It Means'? I'm feeling way out of my depth at the moment, and while I have excellent supervisors who bizarrely seem to think I can do it, I don't seem to have the wherewithal to know how to start writing or even what I should be trying to do.

Any suggestions welcome (please!)

Thanks.

Hi Emmafraggle,

I am in a same position. I too feel that I am overloaded with the data from FGDs and the media - huge piles. The same problem of theorizing. I wanted to start the similar thread - hopefully, answers to yr thread would benefit me too.

Well, it's nice to know I'm not the only one (and I'm not that thick that I don't imagine many other PhD students to have similar problems!).

I think I'm just going to write and hope something comes to me that sounds halfway intelligent. The thing that worries me is that the field I'm writing about is, bizarrely, lacking in previous research, therefore I feel like I'm trying to cover all bases as nothing (much) has been written before, therefore I feel like I'm trying to do everything, rather than focus on one small thing that hasn't been covered before. It feels like I've got a whole new unexplored ocean to cover, rather than a small beach!

Any suggestions most welcome!

Hi Em,
I don't think your experience is uncommon. At least, I know I feel something similar now I'm writing up. It seems to me that it is about developing the ability to (temporarily) put aside something you have done and say 'that is not going in my thesis'. It's really hard to do! Every time I meet with my sup lately I say 'what about this bit on x'? And he almost always responds 'brief footnote' or 'you don't have space for that'. It seems like throwing work away but actually it will make for a better thesis and you can use the other material in future publications and conference papers.
So, my advice would be that, painful as it is, you have to be incredibly specific and focus. You can't construct a big grand theory of everything. You can pay really close attention to one particular piece of data, bring that data into connection with one or two theoretical structures and draw some solid conclusions. Then repeat! I'm not in the same area as you but this is what I have ended up doing. i.e. My original idea was to talk about a whole collection of papers, then just one group, now an even smaller section of that group, in really close detail, bringing in conversation partners from the discipline to enable me to say interesting things about the papers. So I have no grand theory, but draw all the time on specific "data" and make fruitful engagements with theory, but not with all the theory that could possibly be considered relevant - just the bits I have selected as especially useful.
Hope this helps. (I'm not very good at it in practice so I know how tough it is).;-)

I don't have much research experience but when I faced a simpler situation I wrote everything down and then started summarising. I doubt that it was the correct approach but after a long struggle of cutting down I decided what was important and worth keeping. I do the common mistake of getting too attached with what I write and have trouble letting things go. I wonder what more experienced students think.

I've just been in contact with a friend of mine who has a PhD, who stated: 'Big Thoughts are rare, perhaps mythical. The work is the methodical carrying out of small and individually uncreative steps. You'll only see it for what it is when you can step back from it. In other words, in at least two years' time! "Carpet-straightening in the halls of knowledge". In my experience, perspective comes after completing the thesis, not before'

If that helps anyone . . .

I think you hit the nail on the head. There will be a lot of discarding of data in the finalised article but you'll have to do a lot of analysis to get to that point though. If it is a case of doing that, maybe the use of Pivot Tables in Excel may give you the overall general trends and then maybe a start.